Neil Gentleman-Hobbs's Linkedin Analytics

China’s MiniMax debuts M1 AI model that it says costs 200x less to train than OpenAI’s GPT-4 🔥👇🏽 If true, this could be even bigger than Deepseek! If you recall in January, DeepSeek’s R1 AI model took the world by storm, followed by a startup called Butterfly Effect releasing its “agentic AI” model Manus in March that briefly captured the spotlight. And, now, it’s a Shanghai-based upstart called MiniMax, best known previously for releasing AI-generated video games, that is the talk of the AI industry thanks to their M1 model it debuted on June 16, 2025. It’s important to highlight that none of their claims have been independently verified, but the company says it spent just $534,700 renting the data center computing resources needed to train M1. As Fortune highlighted, this is nearly 200x times cheaper than estimates of the training cost of ChatGPT 4-o, whose training cost, industry experts say, likely exceeded $100 million (OpenAI has not released the training costs) 🤔 According to data MiniMax published, its M1 is competitive with top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek when it comes to both intelligence and creativity, but is dirt cheap to train and run [1] Make no mistake, if this turns out to be remotely accurate, I cannot see how investors who’ve flushed hundreds of billions into private LLM makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, will be happy with that. Unless their brains have totally melted from their prolonged exposure to the hype fumes. Joking aside, mark my words: investors will absolutely flip! Not to mention Microsoft’s and Google’s shareholders will start causing headaches to the leaderships. As I have reminded y’all many times, the GenAI business model is deeply unprofitable. Why do you think I stayed away from it? I’m not in the game of being forced into an arms race that will drag me and my company into colossal financial losses. No thanks 🙂‍↔️ According to an October report from tech publication The Information, OpenAI was likely on track to lose $14 billion in 2026 and was unlikely to break even until 2028 — based on OpenAI financial documents that had been shared with investors [2] Not to mention, the recently reported escalating rift between OpenAI and their sugar daddy Microsoft [3] Does this look like a stable market to you? Yes, I am biased towards open source and I find it astonishing that, while we in the West decided to stick our heads up our backsides, China are steaming ahead with the logical approach towards GenAI [4] Where are we going? — Follow me, Tim El-Sheikh and join the conversation on The CEO Retort podcast and newsletter, with straight-to-the-point discussions, amazing guests, no hype, no bullish*t, and we don’t pull any punches. 👉🏽 Please support our independence and fearless reporting: https://lnkd.in/eKQF9PuV — #ceo #ai #OpenSource #ethics #innovation